... nothing in this bill has anything whatsoever to do with your relationship with your doctor. It has everything to do, however, with your relationship with your health insurance company. And if your insurer isn't screwing you already, you can bet they're about to. With respect to your choice: you almost certainly don't have one. Your employer is deciding for you which company you'll use, what benefits you'll get, and what you'll contributed to the costs. And more and more, they're deciding not to offer coverage at all, which leaves you to the tender mercies of the individual market.
You need to get your facts straight
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It amazes me that with the high percentage of negative public opinion on the health care bill that congress is still considering it. This is supposed to be government by the will of the people, right? To me, the will of the people is not being executed here.
Current support for the bill is running about even - around 45-45, with the remainder undecided. And if you ask people whether they're in favor of what's actually in the bill, they're overwhelmingly in favor. It's just that the Republicans (and their benefactors, the insurance companies) have done a good job of making the bill look bad in the public eye.
Also, this is apparent in the back door manner in which they are trying to pass the bill by some trick of house/senate rules. This isn't some bill to appropriate a few million dollars for federal park support but a bill involving a trillion dollars of outlay.
The republican house in 2005-06 used the same "back door manner" to pass almost a third of all the legislation they passed, and no one said a word. This argument is just dumb. The house is just going to vote on the original bill and the reconciliation fix at the same time. There's nothing "back-door" about it.
With respect to tort reform - this is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt by the Republican party to get back at a group of people that traditionally gives more money to the other party (lawyers). Study after study has shown that tort reform would have a negligible effect on medical costs.
to provide health care for the lowest percentage of folks who mostly don't have insurance because they would rather have multiple TV's, cars and luxury items rather than buy health insurance.
Do you have even the faintest idea what health care coverage costs on the individual market? I was looking into starting my own business at one point... until I researched individual medical coverage. The costs for a plan equivalent to my employer provided plan was going to cost more than my freaking mortgage. I'm really pretty sure that the "lowest percentage of folks" are not spending enough on TVs and "luxury items" to cover even a catastrophic plan. And in any case, insurance companies will rescind your coverage at the drop of a hat the minute you come down with any expensive condition.
So yeah, keep bitching about those lucky poor folks. That makes a lot of sense.
If you require insurers to cover everyone who applies, but don't force everyone to get coverage... you get the so-called death spiral. Healthy people don't get insurance until they get sick... then apply and get covered. Premiums have to go up as a result. More people decided not to get covered until they get sick. Premiums go up more. Before long, insurers go out of business because no one can afford their product.
To be successful, the plan has to include all three elements: 1) no rejections for pre-existing conditions, 2) an insurance mandate, and 3) subsidies for those who can't afford the mandate. Of course, single payer would be simpler and better, but it's not politically possible right now.
Number one, it's a complex topic and the law is not exactly going to fit on the back of a goddamn cereal box. Number two... have you ever looked at an actual bill? The use enormous fonts and huge amounts of white space. A resolution honoring National Dogcatcher Recognition Day would fill up a hundred pages.
The election where this was in question was LAST YEAR. It was, you know, the biggest topic of the entire election season? People sent THIS CONGRESS to DC to do HCR. It's time for them to do it.
The US spends more money in percent of GDP in health care than any other country in the world [wikipedia.org].
Yes, and we also spend more per capita than any other country in the world... and we don't even freakin' cover everyone! And we are pretty far down the list in effectiveness too - far from being number one, we're in the low teens in life expectancy, infant mortality, and a host of other measures. The system we have is a total mess and needs to be fixed NOW.
Re:This bill has nothing to do with health care.
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
Rather the proposal is for something kinda inbetween, which runs the risk that it may not work as well as ~either~.
For one thing, nothing, and I do mean nothing, could possibly be worse than what we have now, which is fiscally unsustainable and leaves like a quarter of the country with no coverage at all. Secondly, while I agree that single payer is better, it's far from the only successful model. Germany, for example, uses a somewhat similar model to this, and it seems to be working acceptably well for them.
Maybe you should read the actual bill
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
Since it answers all these objections.
1. An overwhelming number of Americans will not see any changes to their health care plans under this bill. They'll just get protection from fun industry practices like "recission" and lifetime caps.
2. Which is why this bill changes the way government taxes health care plans - so-called "cadillac" plans will now be subject to excise taxes.
3. Your point is incoherent: you are simultaneously claiming that Medicare spends too much, and that it doesn't spend enough. In any case, this bill saves TRILLIONS of dollars over 20 years.
4. As pointed out below, Switzerland is one of the least cost effective systems in the world - only ours is worse (and ours is a LOT worse).
5. By almost any measure, Americans pay more and have worse outcomes than anywhere else in the civilized world. We're way down the list in life expectancy. We're way down the list in infant mortality. We're way down the list in outcomes of a whole slew of conditions.
Our current system sucks hard. This bill is not perfect, but makes it better.
Just to pick out one point from this morass
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
Comprehensive insurance pays for everything and so people don't shop around for the best deal.
Right, because when I'm suffering chest pain, or my wife goes into premature labor, or I fall off a ladder and break my leg, obviously I'm going to have plenty of time to "shop around for the best deal". Or when I get diagnosed with colon cancer, I'm certainly going to be qualified to decide which of the various doctors along the price/quality scale are right for my needs.
This argument is just ridiculous. There are lots of things for which the market excels at providing the best deal for the customer - making cars, say. But for things like basic services - defense, fire protection, and yes, medical care - the incentives behind market-based provision of the service are so screwed up that it's virtually guaranteed you'll get hosed... like we all are now.
Luckily, no one is talking about gov't run health
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
This bill, of course, is about health insurance, not providing actual care. And it's really hard to see how anyone could foul up health insurance more than the private companies currently raping us in this business.
The case of Texas is instructive - they strictly limited damage payouts for medical malpractice cases... and their medical malpractice insurance premiums continued to escalate at exactly the same rate as the rest of the country. Nor was there any particular change in overall health-care cost escalation. So I think we can safely ignore this particular line of argument.
This is a frequent misconception
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 3, Informative
I'm not a fan of the bill -- the lack of a public option creates, as you say, a major problem by forcing people to give money to insurance companies that have little incentive not to gouge their captive market. A mandate *is* necessary, though, for insurance-based health reform to work. (That's why single-payer was the way to go...)
In fact, per the bill, insurers have to pay out 85% of their revenues in actual medical care, which means it's more or less impossible for them to just charge whatever they want. Yes, a public option would be better, and single-payer would be better still... but this bill is still a huge improvement on the status quo.
ind any government agency that's tried to do exceptionally well and you'll find that the smaller the scope of their responsibility the better they did. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Postal Service, any regulatory agency - you get the picture. The federal government simply doesn't have a good resume; you can't blame the unbiased peoples for not loving the idea of the government running yet another program.
Simply not true. The Defense Department, for example, is probably the most enormous government agency in the world, and by all accounts it does a fine job in providing defense services. And more to the point: which provider of health services gets the highest marks for patient outcomes and patient satisfaction? That would be the VA. Which insurer has the lowest costs and highest customer satisfaction? That would be Medicare.
The meme of the federal goverment being ineffective is popular, but it has no basis in reality.
In exchange, there are a lot of parts that are a big giveaway to insurance companies: because we've focused on giving everyone insurance instead of giving everyone health care, individuals are forced to buy insurance, but with inadequate oversight to ensure that insurance companies don't just gouge prices.
Actually, there are provisions in place to keep them from just charging whatever they want: they have to pay out at least 85% of revenues on actual medical care. Given that insurance companies have their own staff that they have to pay, this puts pretty strict limits on how much they can actually profit.
The bigger issue in my opinion is where does the government think it has the right to tell me what kind of light bulb that I HAVE to use in my own home.
As was pointed out above, when you stop polluting the air with your emissions, then the rest of us will stop telling you what to do about your lighting. This may come as a shock, but the things you do affect other people.
Energy is a big issue but the problem is not because of what kind of light bulb I choose to use in my home, it is because self interested politicians have prevented the best solutions to be implemented.
"Self-interested politicians" didn't specify that everyone had to switch to any particular technology. The rules are that bulbs have to attain a certain number of lumens/watt. The market your so endeared with determined that the best current way to do that is with CFLs. In the future, the market may supplant CFLs with LED lights depending on their relative cost and efficiency.
The rest of your post is a recap of the same tired old BS that's been spouted against CFLs from the beginning. If you really cared about mercury, for example, you'd be switching over to CFLs in a heartbeat, because net emissions of mercury to the environment drop sharply when you use them... because so much coal-fired electricity is saved (unless you're in one of the few areas... Quebec, the Pacific northwest) where most electricity is hydro. But it's obvious that the real point here is to bitch about the government, and that's fine, go ahead and bitch. The rest of the world is seeing to it that we move on from crappy, outdated, heavily polluting technologies, whether you agree or not.
Your answer almost certainly presumes that all the mercury will vaporize from the bulb before you sweep it up and discard it, which I find more or less impossible to believe.
You're not even using the correct units. Ok, so a bulb has 4 mg of Hg. The airborne exposure limits are quoted in units of mg/m^3. I can absolutely promise you that the entire 4 g of mercury is not going to vaporize (at least before you sweep up the mess), and what does vaporize is going to have quite a few cubic meters to disperse in. So I think you need to rethink that one.
... and the results were that illegal immigrants are primarily competing with, and lowering the wages of, Americans with less than a high-school education (sorry, can't now find the link). For everyone else, there was no effect. While that's bad news for those without the diploma, that is actually a pretty small subset of the labor force.
The main consideration in both Congress and the White House is that the existing insurance companies and the flock of other medical management firms, which do no actual medical work at all, maintain or increase their income. Actual medical care is far down in the list of priorities.
While I share your view that the purpose of government, in recent years, has become to further enrich the already really well-off, this statement is not quite true. There is a provision in the health care bill that forces insurers to spend at least 85% of their income on actual medical care. Given that insurance companies also have their own staff that has to be paid, this is going to put pretty strict limits on what they can take in profits. It's really a pretty smart provision.
I guarantee that if the employers of illegal immigrants started having to do the perp walk, illegal immigration would drop to nothing in about 2 seconds. But that'll never happen, because it would embarrass rich people and more importantly, cost them money.
Trying to build fences and the like to keep out illegal immigrants is like trying to hold back the tide. If we were serious about the problem, we'd go to the source and start arresting the people who employ them. But we're not serious about the problem - the government has chosen instead to pretend to do something about the problem, while not actually inconveniencing the rich and powerful (and oh, by the way, dumping huge amounts of money into the pockets of various defense contractors for silly projects like the "virtual fence").
Unfortunately, the extremes of the parties are the ones in control...
Unless by "extremes of the parties" you mean the rightmost extremes of both parties, I think you've gone round the bend. If the extreme left wing of the Democrats had been in control, Dennis Kucinich would have been the nominee. That guy really is far to the left. Obama? There are few Democrats more centrist. Just a quick example: health care. The current plan in play in Congress is almost exactly the same as the one Mitt freakin' Romney signed into law when he was governor of Massachusetts. Until recently, this would have been a Republican health care plan - the mainstream opinion among Democrats is that single-payer is the way to go.
Regardless of your personal preferences on issues like health care, it's an absolute fact that the Democratic party is controlled by highly centrist types, and the Republican party is being run by, not to put too fine a point on it, whackjobs.
I do 95% of my music listening while in the car - that's just when I have time to do it. The trouble is exactly what the GP spells out... you can't hear the quiet parts, so you turn up the volume... and then your eardrums get blown out when the cannons go off. Nothing against classical music - I really like it (at least some pieces). But I almost never end up listening to any, because you just can't do it in a car.
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... nothing in this bill has anything whatsoever to do with your relationship with your doctor. It has everything to do, however, with your relationship with your health insurance company. And if your insurer isn't screwing you already, you can bet they're about to. With respect to your choice: you almost certainly don't have one. Your employer is deciding for you which company you'll use, what benefits you'll get, and what you'll contributed to the costs. And more and more, they're deciding not to offer coverage at all, which leaves you to the tender mercies of the individual market.
Current support for the bill is running about even - around 45-45, with the remainder undecided. And if you ask people whether they're in favor of what's actually in the bill, they're overwhelmingly in favor. It's just that the Republicans (and their benefactors, the insurance companies) have done a good job of making the bill look bad in the public eye.
The republican house in 2005-06 used the same "back door manner" to pass almost a third of all the legislation they passed, and no one said a word. This argument is just dumb. The house is just going to vote on the original bill and the reconciliation fix at the same time. There's nothing "back-door" about it.
With respect to tort reform - this is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt by the Republican party to get back at a group of people that traditionally gives more money to the other party (lawyers). Study after study has shown that tort reform would have a negligible effect on medical costs.
Do you have even the faintest idea what health care coverage costs on the individual market? I was looking into starting my own business at one point... until I researched individual medical coverage. The costs for a plan equivalent to my employer provided plan was going to cost more than my freaking mortgage. I'm really pretty sure that the "lowest percentage of folks" are not spending enough on TVs and "luxury items" to cover even a catastrophic plan. And in any case, insurance companies will rescind your coverage at the drop of a hat the minute you come down with any expensive condition.
So yeah, keep bitching about those lucky poor folks. That makes a lot of sense.
If you require insurers to cover everyone who applies, but don't force everyone to get coverage... you get the so-called death spiral. Healthy people don't get insurance until they get sick... then apply and get covered. Premiums have to go up as a result. More people decided not to get covered until they get sick. Premiums go up more. Before long, insurers go out of business because no one can afford their product.
To be successful, the plan has to include all three elements: 1) no rejections for pre-existing conditions, 2) an insurance mandate, and 3) subsidies for those who can't afford the mandate. Of course, single payer would be simpler and better, but it's not politically possible right now.
Number one, it's a complex topic and the law is not exactly going to fit on the back of a goddamn cereal box. Number two... have you ever looked at an actual bill? The use enormous fonts and huge amounts of white space. A resolution honoring National Dogcatcher Recognition Day would fill up a hundred pages.
The election where this was in question was LAST YEAR. It was, you know, the biggest topic of the entire election season? People sent THIS CONGRESS to DC to do HCR. It's time for them to do it.
Yes, and we also spend more per capita than any other country in the world... and we don't even freakin' cover everyone! And we are pretty far down the list in effectiveness too - far from being number one, we're in the low teens in life expectancy, infant mortality, and a host of other measures. The system we have is a total mess and needs to be fixed NOW.
For one thing, nothing, and I do mean nothing, could possibly be worse than what we have now, which is fiscally unsustainable and leaves like a quarter of the country with no coverage at all. Secondly, while I agree that single payer is better, it's far from the only successful model. Germany, for example, uses a somewhat similar model to this, and it seems to be working acceptably well for them.
Since it answers all these objections.
1. An overwhelming number of Americans will not see any changes to their health care plans under this bill. They'll just get protection from fun industry practices like "recission" and lifetime caps.
2. Which is why this bill changes the way government taxes health care plans - so-called "cadillac" plans will now be subject to excise taxes.
3. Your point is incoherent: you are simultaneously claiming that Medicare spends too much, and that it doesn't spend enough. In any case, this bill saves TRILLIONS of dollars over 20 years.
4. As pointed out below, Switzerland is one of the least cost effective systems in the world - only ours is worse (and ours is a LOT worse).
5. By almost any measure, Americans pay more and have worse outcomes than anywhere else in the civilized world. We're way down the list in life expectancy. We're way down the list in infant mortality. We're way down the list in outcomes of a whole slew of conditions.
Our current system sucks hard. This bill is not perfect, but makes it better.
Right, because when I'm suffering chest pain, or my wife goes into premature labor, or I fall off a ladder and break my leg, obviously I'm going to have plenty of time to "shop around for the best deal". Or when I get diagnosed with colon cancer, I'm certainly going to be qualified to decide which of the various doctors along the price/quality scale are right for my needs.
This argument is just ridiculous. There are lots of things for which the market excels at providing the best deal for the customer - making cars, say. But for things like basic services - defense, fire protection, and yes, medical care - the incentives behind market-based provision of the service are so screwed up that it's virtually guaranteed you'll get hosed... like we all are now.
This bill, of course, is about health insurance, not providing actual care. And it's really hard to see how anyone could foul up health insurance more than the private companies currently raping us in this business.
The case of Texas is instructive - they strictly limited damage payouts for medical malpractice cases... and their medical malpractice insurance premiums continued to escalate at exactly the same rate as the rest of the country. Nor was there any particular change in overall health-care cost escalation. So I think we can safely ignore this particular line of argument.
In fact, per the bill, insurers have to pay out 85% of their revenues in actual medical care, which means it's more or less impossible for them to just charge whatever they want. Yes, a public option would be better, and single-payer would be better still... but this bill is still a huge improvement on the status quo.
Simply not true. The Defense Department, for example, is probably the most enormous government agency in the world, and by all accounts it does a fine job in providing defense services. And more to the point: which provider of health services gets the highest marks for patient outcomes and patient satisfaction? That would be the VA. Which insurer has the lowest costs and highest customer satisfaction? That would be Medicare.
The meme of the federal goverment being ineffective is popular, but it has no basis in reality.
Actually, there are provisions in place to keep them from just charging whatever they want: they have to pay out at least 85% of revenues on actual medical care. Given that insurance companies have their own staff that they have to pay, this puts pretty strict limits on how much they can actually profit.
As was pointed out above, when you stop polluting the air with your emissions, then the rest of us will stop telling you what to do about your lighting. This may come as a shock, but the things you do affect other people.
"Self-interested politicians" didn't specify that everyone had to switch to any particular technology. The rules are that bulbs have to attain a certain number of lumens/watt. The market your so endeared with determined that the best current way to do that is with CFLs. In the future, the market may supplant CFLs with LED lights depending on their relative cost and efficiency.
The rest of your post is a recap of the same tired old BS that's been spouted against CFLs from the beginning. If you really cared about mercury, for example, you'd be switching over to CFLs in a heartbeat, because net emissions of mercury to the environment drop sharply when you use them... because so much coal-fired electricity is saved (unless you're in one of the few areas... Quebec, the Pacific northwest) where most electricity is hydro. But it's obvious that the real point here is to bitch about the government, and that's fine, go ahead and bitch. The rest of the world is seeing to it that we move on from crappy, outdated, heavily polluting technologies, whether you agree or not.
Your answer almost certainly presumes that all the mercury will vaporize from the bulb before you sweep it up and discard it, which I find more or less impossible to believe.
You're not even using the correct units. Ok, so a bulb has 4 mg of Hg. The airborne exposure limits are quoted in units of mg/m^3. I can absolutely promise you that the entire 4 g of mercury is not going to vaporize (at least before you sweep up the mess), and what does vaporize is going to have quite a few cubic meters to disperse in. So I think you need to rethink that one.
... you also buy audio cables with gold contacts, and like vinyl because it's "richer" and "warmer".
... except that you can get CFLs in absolutely any color temperature you want. So yes, your statement is crap.
... and the results were that illegal immigrants are primarily competing with, and lowering the wages of, Americans with less than a high-school education (sorry, can't now find the link). For everyone else, there was no effect. While that's bad news for those without the diploma, that is actually a pretty small subset of the labor force.
While I share your view that the purpose of government, in recent years, has become to further enrich the already really well-off, this statement is not quite true. There is a provision in the health care bill that forces insurers to spend at least 85% of their income on actual medical care. Given that insurance companies also have their own staff that has to be paid, this is going to put pretty strict limits on what they can take in profits. It's really a pretty smart provision.
I guarantee that if the employers of illegal immigrants started having to do the perp walk, illegal immigration would drop to nothing in about 2 seconds. But that'll never happen, because it would embarrass rich people and more importantly, cost them money.
Trying to build fences and the like to keep out illegal immigrants is like trying to hold back the tide. If we were serious about the problem, we'd go to the source and start arresting the people who employ them. But we're not serious about the problem - the government has chosen instead to pretend to do something about the problem, while not actually inconveniencing the rich and powerful (and oh, by the way, dumping huge amounts of money into the pockets of various defense contractors for silly projects like the "virtual fence").
Unless by "extremes of the parties" you mean the rightmost extremes of both parties, I think you've gone round the bend. If the extreme left wing of the Democrats had been in control, Dennis Kucinich would have been the nominee. That guy really is far to the left. Obama? There are few Democrats more centrist. Just a quick example: health care. The current plan in play in Congress is almost exactly the same as the one Mitt freakin' Romney signed into law when he was governor of Massachusetts. Until recently, this would have been a Republican health care plan - the mainstream opinion among Democrats is that single-payer is the way to go.
Regardless of your personal preferences on issues like health care, it's an absolute fact that the Democratic party is controlled by highly centrist types, and the Republican party is being run by, not to put too fine a point on it, whackjobs.
I do 95% of my music listening while in the car - that's just when I have time to do it. The trouble is exactly what the GP spells out... you can't hear the quiet parts, so you turn up the volume... and then your eardrums get blown out when the cannons go off. Nothing against classical music - I really like it (at least some pieces). But I almost never end up listening to any, because you just can't do it in a car.